Where Elephant's kids are unwitting lambs to the slaughter, Blake knows as well as we do the foregone conclusion. Last Days' blurred sense of interior and exteriorits living-death conception of limbobrings to mind another American masterpiece (with which it could have exchanged titles): Jarmusch's Dead Man, whose enigmatic hero happens to be called William Blake. Sacred allusions abound: the waterfall baptism (or final ablution?), the Mormon callers, the devotional ecstasy of the featured songs, and above all the climactic separation of body and skyward-bound soul. Not unlike William Blake, Van Sant risks religiosity and arrives at spiritual clarityin a ghostly afterimage that transcends both the Christian notion of Ascension and the rock cliché of the stairway to heaven. Pointedly contradicting Cobain's Neil Youngquoting suicide note, Blake doesn't burn outhe fades away.